Month: April 2005
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Scary
Doctor Who is scary shocker!
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
They thought it’d never be made. Lots of times it didn’t. But now it has. Finally the Hitchhiker’s film has arrived. Obviously this was a preview screening, and I was surprised by the scale of it, with it getting an Empire Leicester Square screening, with a queue winding through Leicester Square on arrival. This was…
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Su Doku
Su Doku or should that be Sudoku? Whichever, it’s the craze that’s sweeping the broadsheet-reading nation. And I was completely unaware of it until last Sunday. That was when I was looking in a bookshop and happened to notice a Su Doku puzzle book that seemed to be in the bestsellers section. A quick flick…
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Advert Lengths
I notice that Channel 4 have scheduled Desperate Housewives to last from 22:00 until 23:05 this evening – 65 minutes. And yet as an American programme, it actually only runs for between 42 and 43 minutes. Since we’re only allowed an average of 7 minutes of ads per hour in the UK, are C4 packing…
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The Indie Has A New Look
The new look Independent launched today. The fact that it’s moved from six to seven columns per page is absolutely an advertising thing since newspaper advertising is sold by the column inch. Get an extra column and you have all those extra inches to sell! But the paper did need a redesign. Nothing too radical,…
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Digital Radio Developments
Some interesting, if somewhat unclear, new developments in radio to talk about. First off, there’s podshows.com which aims to deliver specially-made “radio” shows straight to your mp3 player. There are a host of DJs that you’ve heard of like Tony Blackburn and Paul Gambaccini amongst others, all of whom are supplying shows. You then just…
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Before The Frost
0099459043
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Oracle Night
0571216978
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Rugby
Can it really be true that rugby union want to do away with automatic promotion and relegation? I really do wonder about the rugby authorities. So we end up with a league that becomes meaningless dead rubbers by the end of the season, with the dull games that would bring about. Of course there’s also…
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That Wedding On The Telly
This story just goes to show how poor some TV ratings reporting really is. Media Week are calling the 6.2m on BBC1 and 1.1m on ITV1 who watched the Royal Wedding on Saturday a “damp squib.” For some reason Media Week (who in the same paragraph considered the 7.7m who watched the Grand National, a…
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“Vaughany”
The Independent has an interview (be quick, it’ll probably disappear into a subscription area in a week) with Johnny Vaughan today – or Vaughany as he seems to be called in the text. Just one small point on Fighting Talk: “Naturally, the Americans are all over it and want to buy the rights.” Erm, isn’t…
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The State of TV Reviewing
I know that I’ve moaned about this before, but I still find it intensely frustrating that just about no publications in this country take television reviewing seriously. Look at the writers you get for film reviews: everyone from Philip French, Adam Mars-Jones and Derek Malcolm right through to Will Self. The serious papers have proper…